Writing to Someone

I only recently learned to cherish the art of words, though, as a child, I read constantly. My body huddled into a warm corner of my bed and my nose practically skating over the paper fibers, I fell face-first into the pages, yearning to enter the fascinating fictional worlds of Oliver Twist, Anne of Green Gables, and Jo May. When I read, I heard what they heard, I saw what they saw, and I felt what they felt, so that, in a way, their story became my story because of the emotion they inspired in me. These emotions carried over into my real life even when the rough edges of the paperback began collecting dust on my bookshelf.

But then I went to high school. The drudgery of boring weekend reading assignments squelched my passion for leisure reading, and my one-time hobby became a time-consuming and stressful necessity – it was one more thing on a “to do” list that I simply memorized and regurgitated. Instead of searching the contents for thoughts and feelings I related to, I scanned the lines quickly for literary devices and improbable themes to use in English essays. Hence, even writing inherited the same dullness as its progeny - it became uncreative and passionless because I was writing only about fiction, not the adventurous reality that reading had once been. Written words no longer affected me the same way, and I had little interest in expressing myself through them.

This was my mindset for quite a few years, until my life took a very ironic turn… I became a teacher. All of a sudden, I was being paid to instill an appreciation for reading and writing into the fresh young minds of tomorrow. But there was one catch - English was my students’ second language. For them, reading was not only an academic necessity, it was a tedious struggle to comprehend even the basic meaning of the words on the page. And writing and communicating simple sentences required dictionaries, spell checks, and after-school study help.

As an English teacher in the Czech Republic, I began to appreciate the beauty of communication and the incredible comfort that expressing yourself to others can be. We forget that humans have an essential need to be understood in order to develop true camaraderie. Words give you the power to express who you are and to communicate complicated feelings that can’t otherwise be perceived. Yet, I was surrounded by a country of people that, despite a genuine effort to know me on a deeper level, couldn’t break through the language barrier to comprehend the true meaning of the words I wanted to express. The words were inconceivable, and sometimes even unpronounceable, leaving me feeling completely alone.

So, I began to write. It began with the occasional email home, but then I began to experiment with the words, changing them around slightly to more accurately reflect my mood. I stopped worrying about whether it was appropriate to belie my true feelings to those supporting me on the other side of the ocean, and I simply let my fingers fly across the keyboard in an effort to keep up with months of unsaid words that spilled from my heart.

Eventually, I was writing a short essay or online journal entry almost every day as communicational therapy. When I first began, I didn’t expect any responses – I assumed it would serve primarily as an emotional outlet for me alone. But people did read it, and I got comments from people I’d never even met thanking me for my honesty. Reading the entries gave insight into a life being led halfway across the world, pulling the readers into my life just like a fictional character in a novel. But these words were real, and people could relate to them.

So, that was the beginning of my relationship with words, and, frankly, the beginning of this blog. I still have many words floating around in my head that need expressing and questions that need answering, and I hope that the entries that follow will bring the readers along on a journey through where I came from and where I’m going.